Samsung Bets It Can Sell Smart-Home Tech by Building the Homes
- The company is trying to unite rival AIs under a single system
- So far, living in the future has proven too pricey for most
For years, Samsung has pitched customers internet-connected TVs, refrigerators, and other cornerstones of the home re-imagined for the data-overload era. Now the South Korean engineering-to-gadgets conglomerate is trying to go a step further: making the home itself.
Inside an airy, lavish model house in Seoul, Samsung’s virtual assistant, Bixby, can show visitors what’s inside the kitchen fridge while Amazon’s Alexa assistant controls the living-room lighting and A/C, and a speaker developed by Naver Corp. recommends music and TV shows. Samsung software overlays the in-house and competing products to create a unified control system, and so the company might someday be able to analyze the data created to refine its so-called internet of things.